Bond of Two Lands

13. Betrayal?

Fergus was fast to get into action. Somewhat surprisingly for a man of his gentle temper, he was a commander to rely on in a crisis like this. He limped past the armed wall and grabbed a sword while Hiccup still was engineering a plan to get himself, Astrid and the dragons through it all. 

"To the gate!" the king roared. 

"To the gate!" Merida agreed. She followed her father with an arrow already resting in her one hand and the bow in the other. The Viking girl could tell from the yearning gleam in the princess' eyes that this was something she had long hoped to happen. 

The queen wasn't too much aware of what her husband and daughter were up to, for she had put her first priority in assuring that the young princes were put in the highest, safest, most secluded part of the castle by the servants. Now she turned around to find them rushing out of the hall where the Vikings still sat. 

"Fergus! Merida, come back here, young lady..." She sighed. Merida was beyond her reach for the moment, but she could still behave herself with the guests. "Mi friends, I'm so sorry for this interruption. The beast will surely be put to rest in no time and then we can continue. Meanwhile, ya can..."

"We know what to do." Hiccup quickly said. 

The atmosphere outside the hall was vaguely familiar to the Berkians, in a way which they could more sense than reckon. There were members of the staff running around for water and supplies, weapons being handed from man to man in their way towards the yard and an overall feeling that something out of the regular was going on.

Hiccup and Astrid ran faster than most of the servants and managed through that to make their way around quite soon. But whenever they though they'd reached the gate they'd come through earlier, they faced another endless corridor. When the noises of plasma blasts and screams outside increased, Astrid started pulling the relentless Hiccup aside. 

"Hiccup, wait. We must think. This is Toothless we're talking about, the first Night Fury most of these people have ever seen, and he's making a chaos out there. What can we do to stop it without having our scheme exposed?"

"Our scheme? Astrid, we can find help elsewhere, but it's my dragon they're hurting out there. He's the one I'm concerned about right now." He tried to get going again, but was stopped by the blonde. 

She frowned, as if she was to say something she disliked. "You've been pretending to slay dragons before. There's no saying you can't do it again."

"That was before there were trained archers and armed men attacking Toothless all at once! I've got to do something, and now... would you please let me go?" 

Astrid dropped his arm from her strong grip. "You take my dagger. Pretend to be fighting him while I distract the others, wave with it and so, and tell him to keep away from here."

The tenseness of the Chief's son's face got a bit lighter. "That sounds like just the sort of crazy plan we need."

The pair navigated themselves through the castle with even more motivation. They bumped into Maudie not long after their decision of plan and were shown their way to the gate, which now seemed to be the place everybody fled from. The yard with its stables and peaceful path out to the forest had transformed into a literally flaming  battlefield with catapults that had emerged out of nowhere and archers positioned at every height. 

The king was one of the few individuals that were recognizable in the dusk, due to his great size, and he controlled the entire company from somewhere in the middle of it all. Hiccup hooked loose his sword, Inferno, from his leg and struggled to light it up. Although, when he did, half of the nearby swordsmen gasped in fright. 

"Easy with that", Astrid said. "They're probably thinking that you've been hit. Give it to me, and take this instead." She handed him the dagger. "It's Groncle Iron... as you know. And be careful."

Hiccup put on a small grin. "When am I not careful?" 

She didn't respond, but backed away from him with the sword in her embrace and her navy eyes following every change of color at the night sky. Unlike the Scots, she was used to separating the Night Fury's black skin from the darkness of the heavens. Nowhere could the dragon be seen.  

Then, in a heartbeat, one of the men shouted and pointed back at the building. "There! The beast is on the roof of the tower!"

Everyone who'd heard him turned to point their weapons at the tower. The archers dipped their oil drenched arrows in the fires without letting the target out of sight. Hiccup grabbed the knife harder, took a deep breath and stormed out of the protected nisch in which he and Astrid had stood. "Here! Here, beast! Come and... eh... fight me, if you... eh... dare!"

The whole situation seemed strangely well-known to him. It was dark, armed people lit up solely by the fire pits were running around, and a certain black dragon was finally located. In the blink of an eye, he was back to where he'd been about four years earlier - the night he'd shot down Toothless. 

"What are ya doing, lad?!" Fergus screamed, while swinging his sword in Hiccup's direction. "The monster will blast ya into oblivion if ya don't get away from here!"

"It's okay, I've got it!" Hiccup answered. He then looked back at the tower. The serpent on it had started preparing for a jump, most surely because of the recognition he felt about his bud's voice. 

Toothless flew gracefully down and landed light as a leaf in front of Hiccup. His enormous green eyes were so close that the boy even in the night could see that he were aiming for one of those affectionate, smelling licks. Hiccup increased the distance through holding out the dagger, and his heart ached when he saw the dragon's confusion. "That's right! Be afraid! Get away from here, and... eh... take all of your monsters for friends with you!"

The moment between his words and when Toothless took off into the sky was short, yet it seemed to be an eternity of keeping the weapon on alert towards his best friend, before the king and a mass of others surrounded him in cheer. 

Thanks for reading!

I'll greatly appreciate any comment and vote, and especially if there's something I should improve. 

Thanks in advance // Fish-out-of-Water-5